Email from Ukraine

OF all the world cities that have lent their name to culinary dishes, Kiev

can surely take most pride in the end result.

Sausages from Frankfurt? Lumps of minced beef from Hamburg? Viennese veal? Pasta sauce Bologna-style? Curries from Madras? Serve me instead rolls of chicken coated in breadcrumbs with time-bombs of melted butter inside waiting to be detonated by the probing prongs of forks any time.

A trip to the Ukrainian capital was an opportunity to conduct a twofold journalistic investigation: to hunt down the best Chicken Kiev in Kiev and discover the origins of this extraordinary recipe. Both missions turned out to be much harder than you might expect.

One thing strikes the visitor straight away. Just as a prophet is not without honour save in his own country, so its hometown is curiously blasé about the wonder that is Chicken Kiev. Tell any ordinary resident of the city that the dish has conquered the world - or at least the frozen food sections of western supermarkets - and he is amazed.

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Come on, guys. Let's face it; modern Ukraine does not have a lot to shout about. It only attracts the likes of me in connection with Chernobyl, scandals involving a headless journalist and tapes implying that the president wanted him dead and, at a pinch, stories about the woeful state of its economy. Wise up. Why not market your strengths like Chicken Kiev?

Anyway, I launched my quest with the aid of the English-language bible for students of Russian - or should it be post-Soviet? - cuisine, Lesley Chamberlain's cookbook devoted to the subject. "A Soviet hotel and restaurant classic which has no pre-revolutionary history as far as I have been able to discover," she writes dismissively.

Perhaps the best place to sample the dish was a Soviet-type hotel? I thought. I don't recommend it. The Chicken Kiev I was served at the Kievsky Hotel President, formerly the Intourist, was a sorry beast. It came with two mounds of rice, a pile of pickled cabbage, a few mushy vegetables of indeterminate origin and, worst of all, a film of melted butter on the bottom of the plate. Leakage. "Would I like Tabasco, mayonnaise or ketchup with my main course?" the waitress asked. No, I wouldn't.

Undaunted, I continued my search for enlightenment. Vyacheslav Kozachuk is the head chef at Kozak Mamai, a cossack-theme restaurant bedecked with quivers of arrows, muskets, spears and animal hides and one room decorated to give you the impression you are on board a cossack canoe. He is young and the restaurant is one of Kiev's most fashionable; maybe he could help?

Not really. "It's an old, old recipe which my teachers had been taught about in turn by their tutors," he told me. "But I couldn't give you any exact explanation as to its origins, such as some chef from Kiev cooking it for Lenin in 1917."

Like any lazy journalist nowadays, I continued my inquiries on the internet. On one American site the recipe's inventor was identified as Nicolas Appert (1749-1841), a Frenchman. But it was supposedly christened Chicken Kiev in New York later "to try to please the many Russian immigrants".

This was blasphemy. Chicken Kiev a US import? Surely not. Whatever the truth of the matter, I prefer the historical account given by that erudite authority on Russian food and drink, Vilyam Pokhlebkin. I once met him and his long wispy beard, otherworldly manner (he had no telephone and lived in a small town outside Moscow) and extraordinary knowledge of the history of vodka all had the stamp of authority about them.

His treatise on Chicken Kiev is much the more entertaining as well. He traces the recipe's origins back to the decadent dying days of Tsarist Russia, when restauranteurs tried to attract the custom of moneyed men of the world with gypsy choirs, exotic dancers and erotic "tableaux vivants" as much as food. The Novomikhailovsky Cutlet, as the dish was then known, was invented by an unnamed chef in the newly opened Merchants' Club in St Petersburg and named after a palace nearby. Its vulgar extravagance was typical of the period, Pokhlebkin argues.

World War One and the coming to power of the Bolsheviks brought such high living to an end and the cutlet disappeared. But the memory of it lived on until, according to Pokhlebkin, it was revived for a banquet to welcome a delegation of Ukrainian diplomats back home to Kiev after signing peace treaties in Eastern Europe post-1945.

It has never looked back. So staple an item on Soviet hotel menus did the dish become that Intourist brochures later warned foreign travellers of the risk of splattering their fronts with the melted butter hiding inside. Then it went global.

So, did I find an acceptable Chicken Kiev in the Ukrainian capital? Yes, in Za Dvoma Zaitsyami halfway down Andriyivsky Uzviz, the city's most picturesque street. There was no mucking about with Tabasco, mayonnaise or ketchup here. Even if he did look like Mr Bean, the waiter warned us in advance that the dish was served without the bone. (Purists argue that Chicken Kiev is not Chicken Kiev without the wing bone inside.) And when it came, there was no yellow film lurking at the bottom of the plate and the butter inside had not disappeared into the breadcrumbs but was lying in wait when I made my first incision.

Is Chicken Kiev all there is to Ukrainian cuisine? Certainly not. In fact, Ukrainians claim the beetroot soup known as Borshch as their own and woe betide anyone who as much as implies that it belongs to the "Moskali", the Ukrainian term of abuse for Russians. That said, the delicacy most associated with Ukrainians inside the former Soviet Union is something quite different. Salo is solid pork fat with, sometimes, just a slither of lean. It should be eaten on black bread, garnished with raw garlic cloves or pickled cucumbers and washed down with vodka, preferably Ukrainian "Gorilka".

I am used to it by now. But somehow I cannot see Salo, unlike Chicken Kiev, catching on in the West, let alone gracing the shelves of Waitrose or Tesco.